Crazy Idea # 54-1A i.e. Erase all State Soaring Records every 10 years..

Nick, my recomendation is for you to set up such a competition within your state, or region, and run it. The results are not records, but best flights in category and class. Decide in advance what you are going to include for tasks, to keep the workload reasonable. No need to involve official record keepers unless a record is broken in the process. Publish in your state, or here. But the idea of all 50 states, publishing all best flights in all categories and classes will dilute what your trying to achieve.

As a record keeper, I don't have much interest in spending a lot of time processing a flight that I know is not going to achieve record performance.

Rick

Trying to find ways to motivate people to stay active and involved is a significant challenge.

The Pacific Soaring Council has a number of awards that you could replicate for your state or region.

https://www.pacificsoaring.org/awards/awards.html

Fair warning, I don't think these produce a lot of motivation. If it wasn't for Ramy doing all of the OLC analysis, I'm not sure too many people would even notice if they disappeared.

We also had to modify the rules. Basically Ramy's fault. Some awards have limits on how many times they can be won. Otherwise it's just the Ramy show at awards time. Total distance awards skew towards people with the skills and time available to fly long distances and lots of days.

Our club has a number of fun annual awards which are great for a good end of season presentation and light ribbing at the local level.

Good luck,

Morgan

Nick,

I know your also interested in straight out opportunities, perhaps a Soaring Record version similar to what Bob Maronde uses for tracking the Straight Out Cross Country Results? Its simple, informal, effective, and most important gets sent out in a timely fashion when there are updates. The last item being an unavoidable problem with the 1-2 month print delay with any magazine. The down side is most people have no idea it exists having only found it myself when researching straight out soaring ideas, so I think the big challenge would be getting the word out. Maybe at that point SSA can pick up the individual record story. All I can say is the Newsletter email "Gets my attention" when it shows up in my inbox. Anyway, just a thought and trying to help.

Bryce

On Tuesday, May 19, 2020 at 11:32:54 AM UTC-7, Morgan wrote:
Trying to find ways to motivate people to stay active and involved is a significant challenge.

The Pacific Soaring Council has a number of awards that you could replicate for your state or region.

https://www.pacificsoaring.org/awards/awards.html

Fair warning, I don't think these produce a lot of motivation. If it wasn't for Ramy doing all of the OLC analysis, I'm not sure too many people would even notice if they disappeared.

We also had to modify the rules. Basically Ramy's fault. Some awards have limits on how many times they can be won. Otherwise it's just the Ramy show at awards time. Total distance awards skew towards people with the skills and time available to fly long distances and lots of days.

Our club has a number of fun annual awards which are great for a good end of season presentation and light ribbing at the local level.

Good luck,

Morgan